Video and DVD Players

Access to current DVD and media players is provided at dvd.sourceforge.net. Here you will find links for players like VideoLAN, MPlayer, and Xine.

• The VideoLAN project (www.videolan.org) offers network streaming support for most media formats, including MPEG-4, x264, and MPEG-2. It includes a multimedia player, VLC, that can work on any kind of system.

• MPlayer is one of the most popular and capable multimedia/DVD players in use. It is a cross-platform open source alternative to RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. MPlayer includes support for DivX. You can download MPlayer from www .mplayerhq.hu. MPlayer uses an extensive set of supporting libraries and supporting applications like lirc, lame, lzo, and aalib. If you have trouble displaying video, be sure to check the preferences for different Video devices, selecting one that works best.

• Xine is a multipurpose video player for Linux/Unix systems that can play video, DVD, and audio discs. See xinehq.de for more information. Xine is available in source code form, which you will have to compile and install, though you can download an RPM binary from freshrpm.net.

• Totem, installed with Fedora, is a GNOME movie player based on Xine that uses GStreamer. To expand Totem capabilities, you need to install added GStreamer plug-ins.

• Additional codec support is supplied by ffmeg and x264. The x264 codec is an open source version, developed by Videolan, of the high definition H.264 codec.

None of the open source software hosted at SourceForge performs CSS decryption of commercial DVDs. You could, however, download and install the libdvdcss library, which works around CSS decryption by treating the DVD as a block device, allowing you to use any of the DVD players to run commercial DVDs. It is also provides region-free access. Bear in mind that this may not be legal in certain countries that require CSS licenses for DVD players.

NOTE To play DivX media on Red Hat and Fedora, you use the Divx for Linux codec at labs.divx.com/DivXLinuxCodec.

Originally, many of these players did not support DVD menus. With the libdvdnav and libdvdplay libraries, these player now feature full DVD menu support. The libdvdread library provides basic DVD interface support such as reading IFO files. You can download RPM binaries for these packages from freshrpms.net.